I am running on OJS 3.2. I am trying to streamline workflow for editors who are stumbling over the “add a reviewer” portion of the process.
The listing is not alphabetized and there is no easy way to view the list of names and associated interest areas.
They liked the grid view they had in OJS 2, where it showed all of the names in a list with the topics to the left. It was easy to scan.
Now they have to scroll through multiple pages to find a reviewer name (that is not in any particular order) or to scan for an interest area so they can select a name.
These are my questions or suggestions for future updates:
Is there a way to list the reviewers alphabetically?
Is there a way to filter to show all names associated with a particular interest area?
You may wish to have a look at how reviewer filtering is handled in OJS 3.3. Any changes stemming from these issues is likely to result in changes to 3.3 (if they are able to be implemented), or - more likely - a future version of OJS. Although, I can’t say for certain when/if these changes would be implemented. You can have a look at our testdrive version of 3.3 here: https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ojs_demo/ - to get a better sense of how reviewer filtering works in that version.
Thank you @rcgillis! Yes, that issue #5158 is exactly the problem we’re having. We have over 100 regular reviewers and it seems there is no easy way to scan through the list as it is in no particular order.
As an aside, we have a list of about 130 associate editors who review for us, but we also invite other experts to do reviews. We started out with a clean reviewer list of our 132 associate editors but have since added additional reviewers to the list. I thought I might be able to create two reviewer roles (Associate Editors and Reviewers), but I realized any role with the function of reviewing gets pulled into the reviewer list. So the secondary issue is that the editors can’t easily distinguish who our go-to Associate Editors are form our occasional invited reviewers. I wonder if since it’s possible to allow for multiple user roles to have reviewer privileges, if at some point you can add a filter by user role to toggle between those lists?
Thank you for the response and the direction to the previous issues. I had not found them in my search prior to posting!
Thank you @NateWr Do you know what areas the search function looks at besides the reviewer interests? I have tested this so that I can clean up our list and make it more useable. I think I can use this as a workaround to sorting our reviewers by those who are affiliated associate editors and those who are added invited reviewers by adding the term “associate editor” to the reviewer listing. When I search by term, my list definitely filters and it returned names for which my search term was included as either a reviewer interest or if the term was listed in the reviewer’s bio. However, I also received a couple of names that didn’t have reviewer interests or a bio filled in, so I was wondering how they got picked up - would it be by keyword of a previous submission they’ve reviewed?
I had a quick look at the code and it looks like the search matches individual words against:
username
email
given name
family name
affiliation
biography
orcid
reviewer interests
(We should probably add preferred name to that list.)
The search matches individual words rather than the full phrase. So a search for “associate editor” would return a match if someone had “this editor is an associate”. But it would not match if someone had only “associate” or “editor”.